Distractions

Russell Moore​ on "Why We Want to 'Move On' from Horror":

.... Sustained attention is so difficult with trauma and tragedy because we don’t want to think about such darkness. There’s a reason why most people turn their heads away when they see a mangled body in a car accident along the highway. We would rather pretend that such horrors don’t, or can’t, happen. And we do this not just with the terrors in the world but with our own personal apocalypse—our impending death.

Blaise Pascal argued that we all know we are going to die, so we try everything we can to distract ourselves from that reality. This conclusion, of course, was anticipated by the writer of Ecclesiastes—who admitted his own search for fulfillment through work, wealth, pleasure, and wisdom, only to find these to be nothing more than vain pursuits.

The writer of Hebrews further revealed that this submerged fear of death is precisely the power that the devil has over us (Heb. 2:14–15). To keep from acknowledging that we are perishable flesh, we pursue fleshly desires with abandon—in a way that just leads to more death (Rom. 8:5–13).

The root of our focus on triviality, pleasure, and diversion is not so much hedonism as it is fear (Rom. 8:15). We are afraid of death, so we look for idols to protect us from that—or at least to numb us to its reality (Gal. 4:8–9).

Our tendency to become overwhelmed in the aftermath of so many horrors is heightened by our sense of powerlessness. Even when we identify actions that could curb the problem, we know that almost nothing is accomplished in a civic and political system as broken as ours. And so, many of us simply “move on.” ....

Russell Moore, "Why We Want to “Move On” from Horror," Christianity Today, June 2, 2022.